Australia’s biggest tilt at commercialising university research finally got underway on Wednesday with an initial $180 million unlocked for researchers working in priority areas like processing of critical minerals, renewable hydrogen and green metals.
The Education department run $1.6 billion Australia’s Economic Accelerator (AEA) opened its first round, seeking applications for staged funding for projects that align with specific focus areas like sustainable fuels, artificial intelligence and quantum.
The full launch of the one-year program comes after a protracted pilot over the last 12 months and the program surviving a cut and reshaped by the federal government to support its university access and industry priorities.
It also marks the beginning of a narrower approach to research commercialisation and industry development, with the grants expected to spur the innovation that eventually leads to new companies and industries.
The first full AEA round is offering one-year ‘Ignite’ grants up to $500,000 for early stage research commercialisation projects from basic research to lab testing and proof of concept.
More developed projects with a proof of concept and ready for industry collaboration are eligible for two-year ‘Innovate’ grants up to $5 million.
A later round of the project run in conjunction with Main Sequence Ventures will look to bring the most promising projects to market, but industry will also be abled to pull through the projects.
The competitive grants will only go to projects that align with the priorities of the Albanese government’s National Reconstruction Fund (NRF). The $15 billion industry fund is yet to make an investment but will target return generating industry projects in areas like Defence, renewables, medical science and certain critical technologies.
The AEA program is intended to support the start of a pipeline of industry development, with the government’s Industry Growth Program aimed at developing smaller businesses between commercialisation and the NRF funding.
The AEA is the key component of the Morrison government’s $2 billion Research Commercialisation Action Plan, which also includes the university Trailblazers initiative, PhD funding and new IP sharing framework.
Businessman Jeff Connolly led the 2020 review that created the plan and now chairs the AEA advisory board that sets the programs direction and makes recommendations on the largest grants for proof-of-scale proposals.
The Albanese government continued the AEA program, but legislation to enable it only passed Parliament last year and a pilot program run in the second half of 2024 was delayed by overwhelming interest.
The government also cut $46.2 million from the AEA last year to help fund wider reforms to the higher education sector.
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